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Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Mind Fu?? or Best Book of The Year?

I'm writing this with the most swollen fingers ever seen on a pregnant woman. Why isn't this baby here yet? My fingers can't take much more of this...

Anywho, while waiting for stubborn baby I finished reading the fantastic Amanda Eyre Ward's latest - Forgive Me. Amazing freaking book. She's an amazing freaking writer. But, with all of her books she has a "device." A clever, stylized something that ends up being something different than you thought it was when first introduced. I love it. I loved it in How To Be Lost and I loved it in Forgive Me -- I don't want to tell you more in fear of spoiling it. But, it reminds me of McKee and one of his tirades about "mind fu??'s" In his opinion The Sixth Sense was just a film student's mind game and he hated it. Another example is the great book Water For Elephants and the prologue that ends up being something other than what you think at the beginning. By leaving out a few pronouns and descriptions - the author paints a totally different picture than the reality -- but at the end of that book I shrieked with delight. McKee would have called it a mind-game - a trick.

But I love devices. I love that little wink to the reader - I think if an author is clever enough to think of it and good enough to carry it off -- brilliant.

Poor M.Night, though, he really only had one device up his sleeve. Not so however with Amanda Eyre Ward -- she just gets more and more clever. Forgive Me is a great book - check it out.

7 comments:

You are so right, I loved that devise in Water for Elephants, and earlier in Life of Pi. (in that book I really didn't see it coming and it shook me to the core). I'll be interested to see how it's used here.

Thanks for loaning me that book this morning. :-) Can't wait to read it.

As you know, I tend to like things like that. Amanda Eyre Ward is one of the smartest writers I've read in the past several years. Clever, smart, interesting, beautiful... yet totally accessible and short. :-)